The second EP from Holy Boys Danger Club comes with only two real deficiencies: 1) The name. The Boo Box? Sounds like something my six-year-old made in art class. It just doesn't convey the swaggering, guttural rock this band are capable of; 2) Not nearly long enough. After the tease of 2009's Lessons for Liars, I was more than ready for a full-length, and the six songs here leave me consistently wanting more.

That's not all bad, I realize. Plenty of records struggle to hold your attention for 40 minutes. This record grabs you by the throat from measure one, though, and I want them to flex their muscles, show their range. Frankly, I'd be plenty happy with just more of the same.

Frontman Miek Rodrigue has emerged as a force with his vocals, a weighty rasp like a jagged-edged weapon, capable of conveying real emotion and harsh detachment. I haven't heard anything like it since Richard Butler was fronting the Psychedelic Furs (in fact, I'd pay good money to see these guys cover "Pretty in Pink," but that's the nostalgia talking). Add to that some of the grimiest, wide-open guitar sounds producer Jonathan Wyman has ever elicited and you've got something like the Strokes covering the Hold Steady, smart and swaggering, frothing at the mouth and hearts on their sleeves.

The two openers, "Better" and "The Pressure," positively breathe, sucking all the air out of the room and then exhaling a torrent of sound. The first moves from muted guitar with just bass and high-hat time-keeping to frantic dueling guitar strums backed by manic organ riffs. Spencer Albee guests here, actually, and I'm not sure I've ever heard him play with such wild abandon, cymbals crashing in the background. Then it's nothing but snare work from Dan Capaldi and Nathan Cyr's bass bouncing on a single note, lying in wait for a full-on jam. As the song finishes in lingering feedback you can almost see the sweat rolling down from their temples.

"Pressure" follows similar dynamics, but the guitars are more to the fore, Rodrigue and Zach Jones (not the Zach Jones who used to be in As Fast As) snaking and coiling around one another. There's a great contrast between the languid vocal delivery of the verse, "Heard all those bastards from downtown/They won't leave you alone," and the staccato pop of the chorus: "It's going up, up, up/It's going down, down, down."

Most impressively, these songs are really tight, without a note wasted, a trait they're evidencing for the first time. Their debut Lessons for Liars was recorded before they were really a band, and it showed. The ideas were great, but the execution wasn't quite there. On Boo Box, the execution is worlds better. On Liars, the acoustic closing song was "Tri-State Heartache," a six-minute opus, more than a little bit aimless, with a clumsy moment or two and lots of big-room effect. Here, the requisite acoustic track is "Bedsheets," a piece that shows off a nice call and response between the guitar and piano, is under two minutes, and merges effortlessly into the closing "Letter to the General," where Rodrigue ups his register and hints at Perry Farrell, backed by a wall of sound.

Ghost stories For all of the excitement that surrounded Wilco on the Maine State Pier or Sufjan Stevens at Port City Music Hall or the various sold-out Ray LaMontagne shows of the past year, there is no question that last Sunday's Phish show at the Cumberland County Civic Center was the biggest thing to hit our fair city in a very long time.

Winged migration Since their start in the middle of the decade, Brown Bird have been one of the region's go-to chamber-folk outfits, with a couple of dark and stormy albums earning them a following in various nooks of New England. The release of their latest album, The Devil Dancing , feels like both an ending and a new beginning.

Injustice for all Scott Sturgeon loses his train of thought a couple of times during this interview. He's loopy from jet lag — which is unavoidable after a 20-hour flight from New Zealand (halfway around the planet from his non-residency at a squatted apartment building in New York City), where he's just finished a tour with his claim-to-fame band, Leftover Crack.

Wanting more After its triumphant traversal of the complete Béla Bartók string quartets at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Borromeo Quartet was back for a free 20th- and 21st-century program at Jordan Hall, leading off with an accomplished recent piece by the 24-year-old Egyptian composer Mohammed Fairuz, Lamentation and Satire.

Group hug Things aren’t always what they’re called — we know that flying fish don’t fly and starfish aren’t even fish.

Local heroes, ’09 edition The Rhode Island music community flourished in 2009, with new full-lengths from the Coming Weak, California Smile, and the pride of Cranston West and official big-leaguers Monty Are I, who released Break Through the Silence in September.

Local flavor Local journalist and acclaimed hip-hop scribe Andrew Martin has corralled a flavorful roster of Rhody-based rap talent on the Ocean State Sampler , 10 exclusive tracks available for free download.

Beyond Dilla and Dipset With a semi-sober face I'll claim that hip-hop in 2010 might deliver more than just posthumous Dilla discs, Dipset mixtapes, and a new ignoramus coke rapper whom critics pretend rhymes in triple-entendres.

John Harbison plus 10 Classical music in Boston is so rich, having to pick 10 special events for this winter preview is more like one-tenth of the performances I'm actually looking forward to.

Shout it out! Sharks Come Cruisin' founder Mark Lambert is a Warwick native with a penchant for reworking and penning sea shanties from centuries past, often revised with rollicking punk flare — all thanks to the golden pipes of Quint, the shark-obsessed skipper in Jaws .

TALL HORSE, SHORT ALBUM | October 16, 2014 If Slainte did nothing more than allow Nick Poulin the time and space to get Tall Horse together, its legacy may be pretty well secure. Who knows what will eventually come of the band, but Glue, as a six-song introduction to the world, is a damn fine work filled with highly listenable, ’90s-style indie rock.

REVIVING VIVA NUEVA | October 11, 2014 15 years ago last week, Rustic Overtones appeared on the cover of the third-ever issue of the Portland Phoenix .

RODGERS, OVER AND OUT | October 11, 2014 It’s been a long time since standing up and pounding on a piano and belting out lyrics has been much of a thing.